Are you tired of being distracted by all of your incoming email? Do you wish that your inbox could look something like this so you can focus on your most important work? Well, in this video I'm going to show you how you can pause your inbox.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity. Helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And for nearly a decade, I have been a user of Boomerang, an extension which gives both Gmail and Outlook email users the ability to add some additional features, and I might say, superpowers to our inbox.
And one of those features is the ability to pause any incoming mail.
Now, why might this be helpful? Well, think of how often you've gone into your inbox to write a simple message only to be distracted by dozens and dozens of other new emails that are arriving here.
Or maybe you're tired of receiving notifications on your phone for emails that don't need your attention right now.
Well, Boomerang has the ability to pause our inbox. So once you've installed the Boomerang extension, you will see this Pause Inbox button in your inbox. And by selecting it, we are brought here with a dialogue, which is going to give us a few helpful options so that you can feel confident in pausing your inbox.
Now, just before I walk you through each of these very important settings, including some brand new scheduled settings, what actually is going to happen with your email? Where will they go?
Well, actually, what will happen is that you will have a new label applied to those incoming emails, which will bypass your inbox and go directly to that label down below.
I'll show you how this works in just a moment. But the reason why this is so important is because you can still search for those emails even if you have the Pause Inbox function engaged.
So by selecting this option here, we have a couple of different things we want to keep in mind. We can either manually pause our inbox and turn it on or off as we like, or we can set up a new schedule.
Here on the left-hand side when it comes to manually pausing, we do have the ability to add an auto-reply message. Now, this is completely up to you. This is a personal preference.
If you're worried that someone has thought that you haven't received your email or that your email is down, you can send a simple message telling them, hey, I'll get back to you at 3:00 p.m., or, thank you for your message but I'm only responding to email once or twice a day.
This is just some boilerplate text. You can replace this with anything that you want, including the subject line and the message itself, or you can simply leave this off.
Personally, I would turn this off because I don't want to contribute to more inbox overload with the people who are messaging me.
Down below, we have a toggle for delivery exceptions, and this is very, very helpful if there are some emails that we do want to get through the pause function.
So for example, is there a very important person in your world? It could be a boss, it could be a very important client, it could be your spouse, it could be a parent. Do you want to make sure that their emails get through? You can simply add them here.
Down below you can also specify if an email is sent to a particular email address. So maybe you manage multiple addresses or maybe you're just CC'd on something. If there's a particular address that it is sent to, you can let that bypass as well.
This third one is very, very easy if there's a particular domain. So maybe it's your own domain or someone else's domain, you can let that through as well.
And lastly, if there are any key words you want to look out for within those emails, we can let them go through as well.
Finally, our third option here is to hide the Inbox Pause label. I'm going to show you what that label looks like so you can more fully understand what this toggle is attributing to. But in most cases, I would suggest that you leave this off as well.
Now at this stage, I could go ahead and just pause my inbox now, but if I don't want to manually unpause my inbox, I'm going to come over here to the bottom left-hand corner, and I'm going to say unpause automatically after, and I can choose any interval that I like.
Maybe it's just an hour, maybe it's a couple of hours, maybe I want to pause it until tomorrow morning. I can choose any length of time that I want and then select ‘confirm’. But in this example, I'm going to leave that off as well. And I'm going to say Pause Inbox now.
So a couple of things that you'll notice: at the top of the screen we get this nice large warning letting me know that my inbox is currently paused.
In addition, you'll see that it's actually sent me an email. This is very helpful, especially if you're accessing your Gmail or Outlook account within the application on your phone, because of course this will not be visible, but this will remind you that your inbox is paused.
Lastly, over here under Labels, you can see that we have a new label. It's titled Inbox Paused and today's date, so we know exactly where all of those emails will be going.
If we want to, we can of course cheat the system and anytime we can click on this particular label, I have no new incoming messages at this time, but I can always go and find it here.
And this is very, very important because remember, we want to be able to search all of our email including things that we haven't laid our eyes on yet. So that is why this label is created.
Now, when I'm ready to unpause, I can come up here and select the unpause button. You will notice that the banner at the top of the screen is now removed. It will automatically remove that email that we saw here as well. And finally, on the left-hand side under labels, you will see that that label has been removed as well. So nice and clean. It's not going to leave anything behind.
If I had new incoming emails, they would all be displayed here as well. Let's go back to our Pause Inbox dialogue and quickly look at this new feature on the right-hand side, which allows us to set up a pause schedule. S
o rather than manually pausing our inbox and un-pausing it, here, we can set our own specific work hours. So perhaps you want to pause your email every morning from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. but you want things a little different.
On Wednesdays, for example, you can come in here and edit your schedule and then turn on your schedule. Maybe you want to set up some focus time where you're dealing with your deepest work or your most important projects.
You can set up a focus time schedule here as well. And then the third option here is an interesting one, but I think might be one of the most valuable, and that is a batched delivery.
So rather than setting up windows of time where your inbox will be paused, here you can tell Inbox Pause to simply deliver your email at specific times of the day. So maybe you only want to receive, new email once or twice a day.
You can do so here, or you can set up a different batched delivery schedule here down below. So this I think might be one of the more helpful ones and even a bit easier to set up than the work hours and the focus time. Lastly, they have an option here called Mix and Match.
So you can combine batch delivery and inbox and unpausing your inbox if you want to set up a more intricate schedule. As mentioned, Inbox Pause by Boomerang is available for both Gmail users and Outlook users, and it's also available in the Boomerang app for iOS and Android.
To learn more and to get started with Inbox Pause, just go to InboxPause.com. And if you have any other questions on how to be more effective with your email, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
